The invention concerns chairs of the type having four legs, a seat, a backrest, and a frame which carries the seat, the backrest being secured to the rear legs and, in particular, with the rear legs extending upwardly a considerable distance past the level of the seat.
Stated differently, the present invention concerns, and seeks by means of a rather fundamental change to improve upon, chairs of a certain general type. In this type of chair, the front and rear legs (and also in many instances visible crossbraces joining front legs, and/or visible sidebraces joining front and rear legs) form very essential parts of the chair frame, especially with regard to the frame's function of supporting the seat, with the ultimate design appearance of the chair being, to a very high degree, determined by the geometry of the frame, i.e., determined by the locations, dimensions, orientations, and relative positions of the front and rear legs, as well as of the cross- or sidebraces if such are present.
These types of chairs are extremely common in waiting lounges and waiting rooms, in business conference rooms, coffee shops, banquet halls, and the like. Extremely often, they are furthermore designed to be stackable.
For example, Fed. Rep. of Germany published patent application ("Offenlegungsschrift) DE-OS No. 32 24 812 discloses a chair in which the legs form a seat-supporting frame and are fabricated from specially profiled tubing which is bent into a certain configuration. Connector elements secured to this leg-frame then effect the actual mounting of the seat and backrest. The design possibilities associated with this particular construction technique offer various advantages, considered from the viewpoint of manufacture. On the other hand, the advantages regarding both design and manufacture are, clearly, tied in with the particular manner of use of such profiled tubing for the formation of the entire leg-framework, i.e., such as to cause the leg-framework to exhibit the requisite stability even at the locations where the constituent tubing has its bends. In other words, certain advantages regarding design and manufacture certainly result from the particular construction technique used, but the construction technique essentially predetermines the aesthetic design.
Some such "waiting room" chairs have legs which extend at least very generally said in a vertical direction, sometimes with the rear legs extending upward to a level considerably above that of the seat, in order to mount the chair's backrest. These are usually made of wood, of square steel tubing, or the like.
Especially, but not exclusively, in the case of chairs constructed of light-metal cast elements, it is a common practice that the left leg pair and the right leg pair each be in the form of a laterally attached inverted V-shaped member.
In another known construction, known to the assignee from having used it, a generally horizontal, four-cornered carrier element is provided at each corner with a mounting sleeve, the bottom ends of the mounting sleeves receiving inserted leg rods of circular section, sometimes with the top ends of these sleeve receiving inserted armrest elements and/or carrier elements for the backrest.
Each of these, and many other such constructions is for the most part directly associated with particular materials, particular manufacturing techniques, and result in chairs of a particular, corresponding appearance. Often, the particular construction employed is so determinative of the chair's final appearance, as to even determine or limit the extent to which color and color-combination effects can be provided and, likewise, determine or limit the particular materials, or especially combinations of materials, that can be used.